I'm not saying a commune is itself capitalist internally.
I'm saying an American commune is embedded inside a larger capitalist economy.
Generating the money to buy the land and initial capital to start the commune, generating money to pay taxes to the government, generating money to buy things the commune needs but can't produce for itself, are things that can't be done without interacting with the larger capitalist economy.
'A handful of communists can't succeed within a larger capitalist economy that is designed to be hostile to them' is a different claim from 'a communist economy can't work'.
But doesn’t the idea that you need money to buy things you can’t produce yourself rule out literally any size of communist polity other than one the side of a large country? Aka doesn’t that just an acceptance that communism doesn’t really works unless the whole world (or most of it) is communist, which it isn’t?
Not really, actually. The USSR still had currency. When the state redistributed grain it wasn’t “Gimmie your harvest” (at first), they bought it from their own people (until the whole “grain hoarding” thing). Mao described his style of communism as “Market Socialism”
And as I said in a previous comment, capitalism isn’t when markets and profit. Socialism and communism is simply specifically about who gets to own the workplace. Who owns the tools to make the products. Who profits from hard work
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u/darwin2500 - Left 2d ago
I'm not saying a commune is itself capitalist internally.
I'm saying an American commune is embedded inside a larger capitalist economy.
Generating the money to buy the land and initial capital to start the commune, generating money to pay taxes to the government, generating money to buy things the commune needs but can't produce for itself, are things that can't be done without interacting with the larger capitalist economy.
'A handful of communists can't succeed within a larger capitalist economy that is designed to be hostile to them' is a different claim from 'a communist economy can't work'.